His first novel, A Fair Device, was published in the same year, as was his campaign biography for presidential candidate James G. Blaine.

In this profession, he became acquainted with all the leading British authors, and particularly with Henry James, who wrote in 1890 that "I have lately seen much of the admirably acute and intelligent young Balestrier.

At about that time, Edmund Gosse described him as a "mixture of suave Colonial French and the strained nervous New England blood.... a carefully dressed young-old man or elderly youth, clean-shaven, with smooth dark hair, thin nose, large sensitive ears, and whimsically mobile mouth.

Henry James traveled to Dresden for the funeral, and described it as follows: "The English chaplain read the service with sufficient yet not offensive sonority, and the arrangements were of an admirable, decorously grave German kind.

"[7] Edmund Gosse wrote of Balestier that he had never met anyone "who had anything like his power of marshaling before his memory, in due order, all the militant English writers of the moment, small as well as great.